It has been a fascinating week and such a rich experience working and learning with so many lovely individuals from different corners of the world but also our own garden.
The BYOD4L family, facilitators and mentors, was bigger than ever before. Nine institutions and two further collaborators from the US (Texas Educator Chat) and Germany (ICT-REV) joined us this time. These included all institutions from the previous iteration, July 14, and four further institutions from the UK (see the full team). The online inquiry-based, authentic activities scaffold using the 5C framework (connecting, communicating, curating, collaborating and creating), Nerantzi & Beckingham (2014), stretched over a number of social media platforms and there were opportunities to engage asynchronously throughout the day on Twitter, Google plus community, the Facebook community, but also synchronously via daily tweetchats (wow, what a buzz these generated!!!) and two hangouts (organised by Dr Sam Illingworth) and further creative activities such as the recipe project an idea brought to BYOD4L by Whitney Kilgore. In addition to the plethora of online planned and unplanned activities, participating institutions organised local events, extending engagement even further and linking global to local – is this what we call glocal?
Facilitators and mentors were busy bees during the week. For some it was their first time, others had been involved in similar activities before. We all saw ourselves as co-learners, supported learners but also each other and I observed the same camaraderie we found in previous iterations (Nerantzi et al., 2014).
A community of participants, facilitators and mentors emerged pretty quickly, if you think that byod4l only lasted five days. the team managed to make engagement personal and social at the same time and this is what, I think made a real difference. Interest in each other’s ideas, thoughts and reflections was demonstrated and communication had a warmth and caring tone. I am including a few links to blogs here: Ian Wilson (participant), Sheila MacNeill (facilitator), Deb Baff (participant).
It was wonderful that some participants from previous iterations came back for more and that there were many new faces as will. Engagement in the tweetchats was probably the climax of daily activities and brought probably the largest number of individuals together synchronously. We will be exploring why this is the case, what we can learn from these and what opportunities these might bring for other areas of professional development.
I personally, am particularly interested in inquiring into institutional participation, benefits and challenges to engage colleagues locally, in our own institutions. Sue and I developed the scaleable framework for cross-institutional collaboration and it is now time to find out how it has worked in practice and were it could take us. We are in the process to establish a working group and identify ways that will help us gain a deeper insight into what happened in our institutions and what we can learn from this.
Further research activities will involve the tweetchats, participants’ experience and impact of BYOD4L on them and their practice, open badges to recognise informal learning and others. As we are an extended team, there are now opportunities for many exciting collaborative research projects to be set-up to find out what works, fir whom and why and to uncover opportunities for the future that have the potential to take us to new adventures, stimulate our curiosity and appetite for learning and development.
Special thank you to my dear friend Sue Beckingham and all staff and student facilitators, mentors, badges reviewers, external collaborators -Marc Smith for the NodeXL SNA visualisation of BYOD4L interactions on the various social media platforms and Peter Reed for the tweetchat visualisations using Martin Hawskey’s code, both helped us visualise BYOD4L as it was unfolding – but also our artist and all colleagues and students who joined us during the BYOD4L week.
My favourite tweet of the BYOD4L week is:
@chrissinerantzi I enjoy using Doodlelicious-bet Coaches Eye would be fun. But in the bath and dictating tweets can’t join in #BYOD4Lchat (Kerry Pace @diverselearners, 8.31pm, 16 Jan 2015)
I think, this tweet sums up the atmosphere throughout the week perfectly!
We will start evaluating different aspects of BYOD4L and consider when and how to offer BYOD4L again later in the year. We will be exploring a number of options looking more holistically to connect and combine with other initiatives. Our thinking now develops more into a whole year plan that will enable us to scaffold activities and initiatives.
Bye for now and speak again soon,
Chrissi
References
Nerantzi, C., Middleton, A. & Beckingham, S. (2014) Facilitators as co-learners in a collaborative open course for teachers and students in Higher Education, in: Learning in cyberphysical worlds, eLearning paper, issue No. 39, pp. 1-10, available at http://www.openeducationeuropa.eu/en/article/Learning-in-cyber-physical-worlds_From-field_39_2
Nerantzi, C. & Beckingham, S. (2014) BYOD4L – Our Magical Open Box to Enhance Individuals’ Learning Ecologies, in: Jackson, N. & Willis, J. (eds.) Lifewide Learning and Education in Universities and Colleges E-Book, avaialable athttp://www.learninglives.co.uk/e-book.html. – invited chapter